Jarulan by the River

by Lily Woodhouse

  Sleepless, she wondered who it was that had crossed the yard from the maid’s bedroom. He had turned into the shadows of the porch the moment she had seen him and it had been too dark to make out his form, let alone his features. She wished she was brave enough to cross the dark yard herself, to go into the house and ask the old woman in the kitchen to rouse Mr Fenchurch and tell him that one of the farmhands had … what? How could she describe it?

  An hour or so dragged by. If she could light her candle she could perhaps read a little of The House of Mirth, but the big woman in the kitchen had been stingy with the matches, lighting the wick for her and telling her to cup her hand around it as she went along the verandah and across the yard to the servants’ quarters. Rufina had wondered why she’d felt it necessary to tell her, because wasn’t a candle flame vulnerable to the breeze the same way all over the world? Did she think Rufina was stupid?

  The dark weighed on her like a tombstone.

  It was because they’d found out she was German and so disliked her immediately. The same thing had happened with the staff in the house in Sydney, where the undermaid and chauffeur particularly would avoid her if they could, even though one of the half dozen motorcars the chauffeur drove for Mr Arkenstall was a Mercedes. Herr Schneider had brought it with him on the ship and sold it to her new employer before the former was taken away to camp.

  ‘Make excellent motors, the Germans,’ was about the only thing Mr Arkenstall had ever said to her. He treated her as a charity case, which she supposed she was. Frau Schneider had been a friend of his wife’s — until the war. He didn’t agree with taking a German maid into the house though he commended Louisa for her kindness. Kindness!

  Rufina closed her eyes. The mean old servant was a general, as they said here, not meaning a military ranking but a woman worked to the bone. She had perhaps decided to condescend to her, to make sure Rufina understood she was less than them. One match for you.

  If she had some more she could light a candle and write to her mother, tell her about the voyage and their arrival, the house, where she slept — but a romanticised description, so as not to worry her. Neither did her mother know about the snide remarks in Sydney, the staring on the street, the ill-behaviour of young Cedric, the petty snobberies of Louisa’s friends, and never would she know about the carry-on in the next room.

  Had the man hurt her? Some of the sounds could have been anguish. Could she tell Jean? When they had laboured together upstairs apportioning the luggage to the various rooms, Rufina saw what a good woman she was. None of her sister’s airs and graces and, it seemed, nowhere near as much money, had married down perhaps, if such a thing was possible here. When Jean had bent to pick up one of the Arkenstall children’s new leather suitcases, Rufina had noticed a finely worked mend in her old-fashioned dress where the skirt had snagged. There was an innate, unquestioning kindliness about her that was absent in Louisa. Jean’s children too were like her, with their carefully patched clothes, their broad brows and freckled faces, straw hair and strong limbs.

  Tomorrow, thought Rufina, I will likely meet Mr Fenchurch, who is a widower. As she had learned from eavesdropping on the sisters’ conversation while they waited at the Lismore wharf, he had become a virtual hermit. There had been daughterly anxiety about the father’s state of mind, and she gathered that they had worried similarly about their late mother. This Jarulan was a place to drive you mad, then, miles from anywhere, all dust and brown river and jungle. Perhaps that’s what the name meant. Jarulan. Jungle.

  Just before dawn, a cat began wailing from a tree behind the stables. It chilled her, the loneliness of the sound, the savagery of its longing. Perhaps the cat was trapped farther away, in one of the bony gums that grew as close as ribs around the river. She pictured the small pink mouth opening, the sharp white teeth, its throat dry as it called on and on, on and on, across the country, which she found she had no way of picturing in the night — how the moonlight lay on the trees, the direction from which the sun would rise. A horse shifted and snorted on the other side of the wall, stomping a foot.

  How would it be to steal it and ride away across the land? She could look for gold, write a book, fall in love with a rich man. Adventure and prosper.

  As she dreamed, the day grew lighter and a bird began a monotonous, alien single-note cry, as persistent as the cat’s had been. Over and over, on and on. She lay very still with her fingers in her ears.

  9.

  AS NANCE HAD PREDICTED, THE CHILDREN WERE UP EARLY running about the house. The Sydney children lived in a grand Vaucluse mansion above the harbour, full of valuable art and furniture. Most children couldn’t tell the difference between what is worth a little and what is worth a lot, but the little Arkenstalls did have an inkling, as they tore about the corridors and rooms and stairs, that their grandfather’s house was not quite as richly decorated or as new as their harbourside mansion. There were bangs and scrapes, marks on the walls, scuffs on the stairs and a chip out of a newel post that showed the cedar beneath, red like blood. There were fewer busts and paintings, and those there were, darker and dustier than at home. The library, when they found it, was empty of books.

  For the Sewell children, Jarulan was a palace. Their father could often be heard shouting at their mother, ‘Go back to Jarulan, then!’ Now they could see why, and they wished she would, and bring them with her. Tommy was the most larrikin of them, leading a way past the room that they understood was Grandpa’s now, and another huge room, which was where he had slept when poor dead Grandma was alive, whom none of them remembered. There were other doors, one opposite, which led into a musty, dark, strangely cold space that contained nothing but a medicine cabinet and a leather chair that had straps attached to it and the stuffing coming out. There were no lamps this far along the corridor — though there used to be. They had been pulled out of their brackets, leaving black scorch marks like pictures of strange, pointy-chinned faces with sticking-up hair.

  At first Tommy didn’t see the staircase at the far end, so camouflaged against the dark panelled wall that he was sure it was meant as a secret, or just a decoration. It wasn’t until he had run past the last of the closed doors and come to the bottom step that he realised you could climb up, so he did, the others following him. It had no railing and wide gaps between the treads, like a ladder.

  Set into a panel in the wall at mid-flight was a small cupboard, hanging ajar, and inside it a toy lead tractor, painted powdery red with yellow wooden wheels. It had a little black chimney and a box at the back, which, on investigation, proved full of little pieces of wood, perfect branches, as if they’d been cut off a tiny little tree. It was distracting enough to slow him a little and the other children ran past him. With a great effort of will he slammed the cupboard shut and ran up, up towards the opening, blue sky sectioned by myriad white-framed windows. On his way down from this attic right at the top of the enormous house he would fetch the tractor. He would fetch the tractor and it would be his. Cousin Cedric ran past him in his hard, shiny Sydney shoes that rang on the wooden treads loud as a volley of stones thrown at a tin fence, like bullets from a rifle, from guns in the war, and the battle sound urged Tommy on, light and quick on his bare feet to overpass him at the top and emerge triumphant into a long windowed room shining with light. It was where an attic should be, but it wasn’t an attic. It was magic.

  Patterns of red and blue from squares of stained glass set into the upper windows trembled on the long shellacked wooden floor that ran the extent of the huge house, bending a little at a midpoint to follow the line of one of the two wings below. The low roof was painted white, beamed and cambered like that of a pirate ship’s cabin, and there was only one chair, set to face west at the far end. Immediately Tommy took off towards it, Cedric behind him skittering a little on the polished surface, glowing rectangles of warm sun falling away under their feet. Rabbit-sized balls of dust rolled against the walls and a spider’s silver web covered a whole pane.

  The f
ar chair was exactly like the one in the dark room downstairs with wings and the stuffing coming out, old brown leather all cracked and crazed, though this one had fewer holes and a soft blue cushion. Set beside it, a sea chest used for a table offered a full ashtray, a pipe and an empty crystal tumbler, which, when Tommy sniffed it, gave off a smell of whisky, a smell he knew from his father. It made his stomach roil, worse for putting the pipe in his mouth, which, when he sucked it, filled his mouth with old tobacco spittle. He heaved, spat it into the glass, and had to sit woozily in the chair for a moment — Grandpa’s, he supposed — while the other children ran around behind him, looking out of the windows and pointing at the river and the trees and the distant mountains. His cousin Lorna was counting the windows and was up to twenty. From the window Tommy could see along the carriageway up to the gate, and up the hill to a pile of stones at the crossroads. There was a horse and dray up there, and two labouring figures.

  Grandpa sat here on his own in this chair and looked out, he thought, and a sad feeling rose up out of its stuffing suddenly, together with a bitter old brown smell from the pipe, which made him concentrate on making lots of spit in order to hoik into the glass again. Then a sudden inspiration had him up to swipe the thick crocheted antimacassar from the back of the chair and show the others how you could take a running jump onto it and skid for miles along the floor. Cedric took off his silvertail shoes and raced him in his stockinged feet.

  *

  From the room that was once her mother’s, Louisa heard the noise directly overhead. She had registered the children come along the hall, open the door into the room opposite and her nephew — it was not her Cedric — say, ‘There’s only that old chair.’ The baby in her womb had given a little kick, a fluttering, as Louisa lay there listening to the swarm going on, she supposed all four of them, up to the belvedere, which was an alarming prospect since it was dangerous, with the narrow staircase not railed and empty risers.

  Reaching from her pillow, she tugged the tasselled bellpull for the maid, the convenience of the summons one of the reasons she had chosen this room. In the other wing there was only one bellpull, in the corridor outside the nursery, so one had to get out of bed to operate it. She’d gone against Nan’s wishes, since a room had been prepared for her there, given Louisa’s youngest was only two years old — but Min’s daughter had made up her mind she would sleep in Min’s old high bed. The night before, as she had climbed up using her mother’s low step, though she was really tall enough to have no need of it, she had fancied her mother’s perfume clung still to the sheets, that the pillow smelt of her favourite Worth and that the counterpane retained a filament of hair or an invisible print from her hand. It was ghoulish to think like that, frightening herself, but she did so miss her, her mama, who had burned so brightly, so intermittently.

  She went to the foot of the stairs in her nightgown and called up. There was the sound of breaking glass and a whoop from a boy not Cedric.

  ‘Ceddie? Ced?’

  The high jinks continued and just as she thought she would have to climb up, since no staff was in a hurry to appear, her oldest son put his head over, looking down the narrow well.

  ‘Is Lorna there? And Clara?’

  Cedric turned his head away from her to search into the reaches of the belvedere, as if he hadn’t noticed whether or not his four-year-old sister had followed him, or his young cousin.

  ‘Come downstairs at once. And bring the others with you.’

  10.

  MATTHEW PATTED THE GIRLS’ HEADS AND SHOOK THE BOYS’ hands, all the children lined up with the Sydney nanny on the verandah, where he’d been quietly taking his morning coffee. His daughters stood behind them, beaming proudly, which contrasted with the chastened nanny and the tallest boy, who was churlish until Jean shushed him.

  It seemed a number of them had earlier got away from the nursery and up into the belvedere before their mothers were properly awake. The children had perhaps been woken the same way he was, by a catbird shrieking from a casuarina behind the stable — though he trusted their innocent sleep was more peaceful than the two hours he’d had. If the bird were there again tomorrow he’d go down and shoot it. It might be a good enough specimen for taxidermy, a hobby left off since Min died.

  In the front parlour a large vitrine filled a whole wall, with some twenty specimens of bird and marsupial arranged in lifelike positions, in movement and at rest. There were no green catbirds; they didn’t often come out of the forest, and it was years since he’d gone into the heavy bush with a rifle. He hoped it would stick about. The catbird would be a welcome addition, hopefully sleek and fully grown; he’d sit it near the crow to show off its emerald feathers.

  ‘Did you hear the catbird, then?’ he asked the children.

  They shook their heads, gazing at him. The years had passed so slowly since Min’s death he’d thought they’d be older by now. The eldest boys — what were their names? Tommy and Cyril.

  ‘Are you going to tell Grandpa what happened, Cedric?’ Louisa asked, pushing the boys forward gently.

  Not Cyril, then. Cedric. The other one, a true Fenchurch with his freckled skin and straight mouth turning down now at the corners, looked stricken. Cedric, smaller, narrower, resplendent in a kind of sailor outfit, crossed his arms and looked impassive. What a city boy he was. He knew how to conduct himself, with his sharp little pointy face and flinty eyes, flicking from his mother’s face to his grandfather’s.

  ‘Cedric?’ he prompted, and the child flashed him a sudden, intense smile, delighted that his grandfather had addressed him by name. Poor Tommy had started to tremble as if he feared the belt, and the grandfather wondered if the father was too free with it.

  He drew the boy to him, kept his arm around him. The nanny and children were dispersing and he nodded at his daughters to follow. Women were always too intent on drawing close, wanting to be part of things that were none of their business.

  ‘Off you go.’

  Over her shoulder, Louisa gave him a look, which he failed to interpret.

  ‘What’s the matter, lad?’

  ‘The little tractor.’

  ‘What tractor?’

  ‘In the cupboard there was a new tractor. I seen it.’

  ‘In the nursery?’

  Perhaps some of the old things were stored there, he didn’t know. Llew and Eddie had had regular parcels from Min’s mother in San Francisco, train sets and tin soldiers, a lead horse with articulated joints. He didn’t recall a tractor, but they hadn’t been properly invented then, had they? There had been a little steam car with working parts that ran on kerosene. Maybe that’s what he’d seen. But a new tractor, he’d said. Perhaps he was a story-spinning child.

  ‘What my mother wants us to tell you,’ announced Cedric softly but ruthlessly, leaning into Matthew’s legs beside his cousin, ‘is that we broke a whisky glass because we knocked a table over doing what Tommy said up there,’ he pointed into the verandah roof, ‘in the attic.’

  To no small degree the child resembled his father, the banker son-in-law recently elected to the Legislative Council. The child had his father’s easeful, oily upperhand, and the same thick dark eyebrows, incongruous in his young face.

  Did Louisa want him to chastise the boys, Matthew wondered. He had only just met them.

  ‘You chaps took the others up to the belvedere?’ he asked casually now.

  ‘We skidded on a cloth. He did it.’

  ‘Don’t dob your mate in, Cedric,’ Matthew said sharply. Damn fool of a name. ‘Did anybody cut themselves?’

  ‘No,’ said Tommy. ‘I took care of it, Grandpa. I picked up the big bits of glass and Ma did the rest.’

  Good old Jean. From what he’d heard she’d got used to shifting for herself. Now that the boys were gone, he would adjust his will, make sure she got more than Louisa, help her a bit.

  ‘Good boy.’

  The child lifted his sombre face to meet and hold his grandfather’s eye. He took a ste
p back and shook his grandfather’s hand. Honest, direct, a true Australian.

  ‘Off you go now. Don’t worry about the glass.’

  Matthew gestured widely at the farm rolling away to the north, the river glinting along its western boundary.

  ‘You’ve got a lot to explore. Don’t get in anyone’s way.’

  Llewellyn’s dog came around the corner and lolloped along the verandah. It nudged up against Tommy, who turned to it with glad cries, and Matthew remembered then what else he’d seen early that morning, when he’d gone to the window to see the catbird. Its cries had set the dog barking, straining on its chain, and after a moment or two Evie had come out of her room and disappeared around the stables, across the carriageway and along to the kennels. When she next came into sight she’d had it bounding along beside her. He’d watched her disappear under the verandah roof, his head thumping.

  Bloody stupid. No more.

  Both boys were running away now, the dog going with them, and Matthew wondered idly where it had been in the interim. He remembered his resolve of the previous night to send Evie on her way, but he supposed the women wouldn’t thank him for it.

  On his feet now, he set off for the stables to see if the sulky was ready to take his daughters up to the memorial. There could be tears, since it was the closest they’d ever get to a funeral. He had prepared a little speech.

  11.

  IT WAS A LONG TIME SINCE BREAKFAST HAD BEEN FORMALLY served at Jarulan. Packed away in the sideboard were the silver chafing dishes and their paraffin lamps, the English bone china breakfast service with its pattern of violets, and the honey jar in the shape of a beehive. Gone were the silver samovar, the starched napkins and pearl handled bread-fork. Nance would cook Matthew whatever he wanted, but most often he took no breakfast at all except for an early cup of tea before he went out to give orders and to work among the men. Midmorning he’d return for another cup, with scones or bread, or boiled eggs, cold meat and tomatoes, whatever she had on hand, eaten at the scrubbed and blackened wooden table in the kitchen.